BYLINE: By
Mitchell Stephens. Mitchell Stephens is chairman
of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University
and author of "A History of News."

NEW YORK NEWSDAY covered
its front page last week with a photograph appearing to show Tonya Harding and
Nancy Kerrigan practicing together in Norway - well before the two skaters actually
did practice together in Norway. Individual photos of Harding and Kerrigan had
been blended together by a computer.

This raised some hackles.
"A composite photograph is not the truth," The New York Times quoted Stephen
D. Isaacs, acting dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, as stating.
"It is a lie and, therefore, a great danger to the standards and integrity of
what we do."

But if journalists are
to exploit the full potential of visual communication, watchdogs like Isaacs
are going to have to quiet themselves. Such computer-generated composite photos,
and their video cousins, are needed to enable pictures to better tell the news.

Journalism critics often
complain that an increasing reliance upon images has made the news more superficial.
But how can images probe deeper unless they are given the same freedom words
have: the freedom to speculate, predict, hypothesize, compare and juxtapose
- the freedom, in other words, to present what has not actually occurred.

It is not as if New York
Newsday's editors hid what they were doing: The photo's caption explained that
"Tomorrow, they'll really take to the ice together" and that this was a "composite
illustration." Those words might have been set in larger type, but they were
there. And a headline printed over the photo made clear that the pictured event
had not yet taken place: "Tonya, Nancy To Meet At Practice."

Obviously, any efforts
by journalists to use the new computer-photo and videotape-editing equipment
to deceive would be unconscionable. But why should properly labeled photos or
videotape always be limited to showing only the literal truth? Words aren't.
It is not literally true that those who were offended by New York Newsday's
composite photo are "watchdogs"; their "hackles" were not literally "raised."

It is possible to imagine
journalistic use for a (carefully labeled) composite photograph showing, for
example, a huge President Bill Clinton peering down upon the city of Sarajevo
or a perspiring Clinton arm-wrestling Sen. Bob Dole? Why not a (carefully labeled)
photo of Columbia's Isaacs in which the hairs on the back of his neck appear
to be raised? Why can't photos, like the graphics that increasingly accompany
news stories, illustrate as well as report? Graphic artists take similar liberties
all the time without being accused of lying.

And why must photos always
be limited to speaking in the past tense? Why can't (carefully labeled) pictures
sometimes be allowed to speculate on what might happen? "This is what the proposed
mall would look like." "Here is how he might look after the surgery." "Tonya
and Nancy will practice in the same place." Words are not denied opportunities
to describe the future.

The problem, the watchdogs
might say, is that a speculative picture seems more real, and therefore can
be more misleading, than a speculative sentence. Don't we, in other words, have
different expectations for photographs and videotape than we have for words
or cartoons or graphics? Probably. But, with the help of careful labels, our
expectations are simply going to have to change.

We already watch movies
in which bicycles fly and television commercials in which it snows in the desert.
For most of us, seeing has already stopped being exactly equivalent to believing.
Seeing, like reading, is a method of understanding. In their efforts to bring
us nearer to the truth, responsible journalists have to be allowed to take full
advantage of that method.